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Saturday, June 20, 2015

#1393: Fred Bloem

I have no idea how I first came across this one, but Fred
Bloem runs a “holistic and integrative medical practice” in Maryland, and is a
hardcore promoter of woo and dangerous forms of denialism. Indeed, his website
gives you the antiscience PRATTs and woomeister myths so densely that some may suspect that the whole thing is a
poe. According to himself, Bloem taught traditional medicine for a while before
“it became clear to me that Western medicine as it is being taught and
practiced by most physicians today has its limitations. One of the main
concerns that I had was that many of the allopathic treatments do not address the underlying causes of a patient’s illness,”
which is a bad start.

Bloem is hardly a big fish, but if he has received some attention it is for his advocacy of the debunked HCG diet,
but there is hardly any discernible limit to the level of crazy Bloem is
willing to recommend to his patients.

Diagnosis: Certainly not one of the big fish, and there are
plenty of people like Bloem out there – we cannot expose them all, of course,
but we can at least sample a few. This guy is crazy.